Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II: The Lost Albums review — the Boss’s unreleased music is finally heard

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Bruce Springsteen is to the American worker as Hollywood is to American history. In the dream factory of his songs, humdrum toil is turned into blockbuster tales of working-class effort, sacrifice and redemption. The latter is usually delivered by love, not social mobility. The music is full of widescreen action, oriented around his wonderful leading-man voice. At gigs, Springsteen puts in a heroic shift at the coalface of rock ’n’ soul, sinking to his knees in staged exhaustion before springing back up to finish the goddamn job.

His longest ever concert, in 2012, clocked in at four hours and six minutes, half the duration of the working day that Henry Ford instituted in 1914. Tracks II surmounts even that. This preposterous display of productivity has been extracted from the Springsteen archives as a sequel to his 1998 boxset Tracks. It comprises no fewer than seven albums that he recorded between 1983 and 2018 but chose not to release. In total, there are 83 songs lasting five hours and 20 minutes. The Boss expects his followers to put in a mighty shift too.

Mostly unheard, the majority of the tracks are not demos or studio sketches, but rather fully fledged recordings. The decision not to release them before raises the obvious question: why now? Money, of course, is involved: the seven-CD set is retailing on his website for $299.99, payable in interest-free instalments, as for cars or refrigerators. This is the kind of pricing that reflects the spoils of work enjoyed by Springsteen’s baby-boom generation, the richest cohort in history. But Tracks II is not merely a cash-grab aimed at boomer completists.

The earliest of the shelved albums is LA Garage Sessions ’83, the most demo-like of the seven. Home-recorded during a Californian sojourn by Springsteen, playing all the instruments himself, it follows in the footsteps of 1982’s brooding portrait of a recession-hit society, Nebraska. The tracks share its acoustic sound, but are brighter and thinner. “Come on and follow that dream/And find the love you need,” he gently hollers in “Follow That Dream” amid chiming guitars and genially burbling organ. You can understand why he ditched this homely fare for the era-defining stadium bombast of 1984’s Born in the USA.

The Streets of Philadelphia Sessions dates from 1993. Made at the same time as his Oscar-winning song for Hollywood’s take on the Aids crisis, Philadelphia, the songs feature drum loops, billowing synthesisers and moodily stylised guitar licks. Springsteen sings tenderly about matters of the heart. The style is dated, but winning. “Something in the Well” is an emotive highlight, about a man who has locked away his feelings until he falls in love. “Well, there are some secrets that should never be told,” he sings. This fine song proves otherwise: it did not deserve to be stowed away, and is now finally getting the release it merits.

The album for which it was intended was more or less completed by Springsteen, but he chose to mothball it after a loss of nerve about departing too far from his usual sound. Somewhere North of Nashville also deviates from his signature heartland rock, although not so radically. A rollicking jaunt through honky-tonk, rockabilly and country music, it was recorded at the same time as 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad and shelved as inferior. Featuring various E Street Band members, comical workingman songs such as “Repo Man” and “Delivery Man” are a blast, roared by Springsteen in boisterous barroom form.

Devised between 1995 and 1997, Inyo is also linked to The Ghost of Tom Joad. In the latter album, Springsteen transferred his attention from northern factories to migrant workers in the US-Mexican borderlands. Inyo adds a musical dimension to this geographic shift with the addition of mariachi musicians. “The Lost Charro” finds Springsteen essaying a wobbly higher register, but otherwise this is an atmospheric and involving album. It was put to one side when he decided not to follow up Tom Joad with a sequel.

Perfect World is not really a lost album. Instead, it collects various unreleased tracks recorded between the mid-1990s and early 2010s, all linked by a muscular E Street Band-style drive. “No use complaining, just get the job done,” Springsteen cries in “Another Thin Line”, as though on autopilot. Faithless is also a curio, but more rewarding. It was recorded in 2005 as a score for a spiritual Western film that was never made. The music is Springsteen’s version of cosmic Americana, somewhere between a lullaby, prayer and cowboy psychedelia.

Twilight Hours was intended to accompany 2019’s Western Stars, which found the singer indulging his love of Glen Campbell and Burt Bacharach with countrypolitan and orchestral pop. The unreleased album, for me, is better than the one that came out. “Follow the Sun” is a sparkling Bacharach pastiche with cocktail-shaker percussion and evening-dress orchestration, while Springsteen sings in the gruff style of an affectionate action hero. In “September Kisses”, his voice quavers like Roy Orbison. The fruits of all this strenuous labour are belated, but sweet.

★★★★☆

‘Tracks II: The Lost Albums’ is released by Sony Music